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CNN Sunday Morning

Anthrax in New Jersey Post Offices Brings Mail Delivery System to a Stop

Aired November 11, 2001 - 10:21   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: The anthrax situation in New Jersey has backed up business and angered postal workers, bringing the mail system virtually to a stop.

CNN's Brian Palmer reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BRIAN PALMER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): About a million pieces of mails are still backed up, unsent for weeks. After the Trenton Sorting Center, where the anthrax letters were postmarked had to be shut down. A month after those letters were traced here, investigators are just now looking for and finding traces of anthrax in several other post offices within the same mailing area. One of them, the Rocky Hill Post Office, is only five miles from the return address used on this anthrax envelope. Yet like almost all the others in the Trenton mailing area, Rocky Hill had not been tested for the deadly spores. Mistakes like these have been making a mess of the mail system in New Jersey.

JIM BURKE, AMERICAN POSTAL WORKERS UNION: I mean the whole thing has been just mismanaged by other agencies other than the postal service too.

PALMER: A federal judge ordered a second New Jersey sorting center close in Belmar after a small amount of anthrax was found on a computer monitor. The team sent to clean it up had removed the wrong monitor and had to come back two days later to remove the tainted one.

GARY MCCURDY, U.S. POSTAL SERVICE: As soon as we found out, we took corrective action, we isolated the machine, we informed the employees, we made sure that the machines are cleaned and retested again.

SUZANNE MCGOVERN, POSTAL WORKER: I personally work on the machine that was found to have the bacteria on it. I've -- now that I know the result that it has been cleaned, I do not have a fear about working on that machine at the moment.

PALMER: The workers agreed to return only after the postal service agreed to monitor the building for anthrax.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We think that the postal service was relying too much on experts that had made mistakes and the classic example, of course, is the Brentwood facility in Washington.

PALMER: Two postal workers at Brentwood died of inhalation anthrax before any officials recognized what they were facing.

BURKE: It's sad because they were both dedicated postal employees, and they died because nobody knew how to address this issue.

PALMER: Even now, with the latest anthrax readings in New Jersey, questions remain whether the postal system is reacting fast enough.

JEANNE STELLMAN, PROFESSOR, COLUMBIA SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: The thing that makes sense to do in those post offices that these letters have passed through is to clean it up. It's not a strange process. You can -- you can sterilize and fumigate these things rather easily.

PALMER: That could mean shutting down post offices that have not tested positive so that even they can be cleaned. A small price for putting both the public and postal workers at ease.

Brian Palmer, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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